[mytailorisrich]

The issue, politically and for the public, is not so much nuclear for space travel, it's launching it into space, IMHO. I don't think anyone cares too much if you say that you will use nukes to accelerate your spaceship to Mars (as long as they can trust that this is indeed what you are doing) until you say that this means you will need to build those nukes on Earth and, especially, to load them onto rockets to launch them into space because what happens if it crashes or explodes?